The "Dirty War" Returns to Mexico - San Salvador Atenco Attacks Follow Blueprint of Terror from the 70s and 80s By John Ross

MEXICO CITY (May 20th): Between 1970 and 1982, three Mexican presidents waged a "dirty war" against dissidents from one end of the country to the next. Recently compiled documentation lists 15,000 illegal detentions during that terrible period, thousands of instances of torture, and the forced disappearance of more than 700 Mexican citizens (see "Disappearing the Disappeared" upcoming next week).

Nowhere was the dirty war more cruelly fought then along the Pacific coast of Guerrero state where farmers had risen in rebellion behind the rural school teacher-turned guerrillero Lucio Cabanas and his Party of the Poor. Carlos Montemayor, author of "War In Paradise," perhaps the most vehement expose of that repression, is an assiduous scholar of how the dirty war in Guerrero was organized and carried out.

read on